


Baron

by x_los



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Child Abuse, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Modern Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-03
Updated: 2015-10-03
Packaged: 2018-04-24 12:31:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4919668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life must go on; Avon forgets just why.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Baron

Life must go on,

And the dead be forgotten;

Life must go on,

Though good men die;

Anne, eat your breakfast;

Dan, take your medicine;

Life must go on;

I forget just why.

\-- _Lament_ , Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

The children hadn't been in the car at the time. Avon was thankful for that, though he wasn’t sure who or what he was grateful _to_. Not whatever cosmic force had ensured Blake, the less careful and skilled driver of the two of them, was at the wheel. Not to the storm; not to the other, still-living driver; not to Blake for automatically shoving Avon back when the crash came and taking a steel beam through the ribs in Avon’s stead. His lungs had been crushed beyond all hope of repair. He’d drowned, effectively, in his own blood and Avon’s arms. Though Avon hadn't been conscious for that.

Blake had made the wrong decision about which of them should drive. Which of them should live on. Which of them was more capable of it. And Avon knew he betrayed Blake's trust by not appreciating the gift; by not being a better single parent (even the phrase ‘single parent’ made him want to laugh hysterically); by not quite being able to hide how poorly he was doing from Delia, at least. She was precocious, for nine. But then the idea of his and Blake's child being anything other than precocious was far-fetched.

In fact, Avon suspected he'd gone a little unhinged. But he was doing quite a good job of concealing how out of control he felt from the family friends who checked up on him and the children, for Blake's sake, for the children’s sake, and for his own. That is, he'd covered well enough that they hadn't called in professional help--Avon considered that nearly a bravura performance, given how difficult he found it now to get through the day, let alone perform normalcy.

Everything seemed to take more time now. Familiar objects seemed heavier, his body more resistant to basic commands. His patience, even with Delia and Ben, was shorter than it had been--and it had never been long, his own children or no. Blake had used to say he had other qualities. Blake had used to say a great many stupid things. Avon had used to allow himself to believe them, at times.

Most of all, he calculated the odds. Played the percentages. He'd always been prone to analyzing situations carefully. To obsessive paranoia, Blake had said, but if that had really been true, then Blake would still be alive to say it.

Besides, while Blake lived he had seen nothing, Avon had used to let Ben and Delia eat food he hadn't made himself. He'd used to let Delia sleep over at her friends' houses. Avon hadn't used to know exactly how dangerous every intersection between the house and Delia's school was. He had used to be able to stop knowing things like this, to turn his attention to other matters. But now the thoughts intruded, interrupting his work, threading through his sleep. He woke up tense, anxious, snappish even for him (and it was hard to get any sleep, in the awful emptiness of his bed). Delia flinched when he made her breakfast, slamming the cereal bowls down on the wood table. He hated her flinching, wanted both to apologize and to shout at her for doing it. How dare _Delia_ be afraid of him? Delia was afraid of nothing.

Her school called him in when she got into a fight, defending some little friend of hers. A boy had called Eman a dirty Paki, and Delia had turned around and punched him. Three years older than she was and almost a foot taller, and Delia hadn’t hesitated. He'd punched her back, as much to defend his masculinity as anything. Delia was in the office but he was in hospital with a broken arm because she was Avon’s daughter, and she fought dirty. She didn't give up, she acted like she didn't feel the hits. She went at him, teeth bared and snarling, until a teacher pulled her off.

She was her father's child too, and it had split her lip, and it was going to get her into such trouble. Blake could have given her an accessible, engaging, winning lecture on the virtues of non-violence (Suffragettes would have featured heavily, Avon suspected--Blake had had a bit of a crush on the Pankhursts). But Blake was dead, and all Avon could do was clutch Delia fiercely and run shaking hands over her tangled curls, hissing that she was _never_ to do that again.

It wasn’t enough. Delia acted out more and more, over the course of the year after the accident. The school counselor suggested it was displaced grief. The school counselor was very sympathetic. The school counselor was hitting on him, in a confused, dewy, Madeline Basset sort of way that wouldn't have done much for Avon even if he wasn't a tightly stretched wreck at the moment.

Avon had only suspected before this that he was probably never going to be interested in anyone again, but now he was--fairly certain. He couldn't see it in ten years. In twenty. He didn't mind, really. He thought that was appropriate. Anyone he married, or even dated, would have to endure being cast as some strange after-image of Blake. He couldn’t, in good conscience, do that to anyone worth the having, much less to himself. Even if someone was foolish enough to want it, that didn't mean they should be given enough rope to hang themselves with.

Besides, Ben and Delia didn't need another parent. Or rather they _did,_ but it was too late for that. And Avon could manage on his own, better than anyone else could, and would have to be enough for them. Luckily he earned enough—the idea that a single privation should touch Ben and Delia was intolerable. They'd been deprived of their father, and that was already more than Avon could stand.

He kept Ben home from school one day, because of a little nothing of a cold. Avon worked from home. It was usually somewhat isolating, and having Ben around during the day was pleasant: his six-year-old boy resting sweetly in bed and asking for egg and soldiers, warm apple juice, a story, to have his favourite programme on please, daddy. It was November, and the house was warm and safe against the chill day. There were no dangerous intersections between the kitchen and the bedroom.

When Inga dropped Delia off from school, stayed for a cup of tea and went on, the world felt enclosed in the old Edwardian house Blake had done up for them. Sealed, so that air hardly passed in and out of the well-insulated cracks at the jambs. Everything that he loved—everything still left alive—was here. He and Ben and Delia watched _The Princess Bride_ , and Delia, who had been difficult lately, put her head on Avon’s shoulder and held his hand. Ben fell asleep on his lap circa the ROUSes, and had to be gently lifted off. He rolled, tucking his hand against his mouth, dark hair stark against his pale face, content to sleep next to his dad and sister. Avon looked away because it hurt. How much he loved him.

He and Delia watched on. Evil prince Humperdinck tortured Westley, seemingly furious that Westley was capable of feelings he could never enter into. Had something he could never take. "You truly love each other?" the prince sneered at his captive. "Then you might have been truly happy! No couple in a century has that chance, no matter what the storybooks say. And so I think no man in a century will suffer as greatly as you will."

"I don't want to watch this any more," Delia said suddenly, with Blake's sharp, confident decision, and Avon realized she'd been going tense at his side for minutes now.

"All right," Avon said. "Whatever you like." He tapped the remote, and the Netflix pause-screen swam up. Somehow neutral and nonthreatening.

"I'm sorry," she said suddenly.

"I don't mind--I have actually seen this before," he reminded her with an awkward attempt at a smile.

"That's not what I'm sorry about," Delia said.

"Well now," he said, and he could tell it was a few shades bitterer than he'd have liked, "it's hardly your fault."

It was his, if it was anyone's. He knew he should have driven. Should never have made those plans, gone out in that weather. He _had_ said they should stay in, but Blake had laughed it off, insisted, and Avon had _let_ him, and he should have fought harder but fighting Blake had always been like telling the tide not to come in. He wished it was anyone's fault, rather than no one's--that the other driver hadn't been as blameless as Blake. An object for force to act upon. That Blake was merely mostly dead, like Westley, instead of all dead. Only one thing you could do with all dead—go through his pockets and look for loose change. That joke wasn’t funny any more. But then nothing much was.

Avon didn't consciously decide to poison his children, but he was too clever not to know how to do it. He couldn't unknow it. And…and he made everything they ate. In a life of carefully-weighed decisions, this anomaly crept in, slinking under the barrier of his thought. He felt almost as if his hands moved by themselves, folding a foreign ingredient into batter. And he and the children had another nice day together. It felt safe. So two weeks after that, he caught himself doing it again. The illness that followed lasted a few days. He made cocoa and soup and pancakes, all unspoilt. They played games, or the children slept while he worked. He set the children up making dolls with the nice paper Aunt Cally had brought them after a visit home to Paris. They worked at it, diligent and focused, and presented their results for inspection in the evening. Delia read her book out, and Ben kept interrupting with annoying questions. Everything almost felt all right again.

A month without--and no need to do it, in summer, because the children didn’t go to school anyway. They were safe with him. Together, they went on a somehow tragic, morbid trip to the seaside. Just to Brighton. No one so much as smiled. They ate rock on the pier like a religious ritual, and sat on the stony beach, and did not go sailing or into the cold, cold water.

"What kind of boat is that?" Ben asked.

"I don't know," Avon answered, after a moment. Blake had been good. With boats. Avon had found some brochures for sailing outings in amongst his papers--apparently Blake had considered taking the children, perhaps all of them, on one of those cruises where you sailed a rigged tall ship. It would had to have waited until Ben was a little older, but Blake planned ahead. He hadn't mentioned it. He'd thought he had so much time. Arrogant. He always had been, since the night they’d met, when Blake had simply told Avon that Avon was coming home with him. Avon had seethed and done it and never slipped out of his orbit since. Blake's death had been the first occasion on which he hadn't been able to bully the universe into giving him his way. And Avon, who'd resented Blake’s entitlement and his luck, took back each bitter word and wished both had held forever.

"Can we go home?” Delia asked, carefully.

"Aren't you having fun on your holiday?" Avon asked in a monotone, sarcastic. He stood up. "Yes. All right. Let's go home. Graham Greene is highly over-rated."

"What?" Ben asked, garbled, around his Brighton rock.

"You'll get it when you're older. Come on." He extended a hand, and Ben grabbed it, sticky, and clambered up. Avon rolled his eyes and brought wet wipes out of his coat pocket, fastidiously cleaned his own hand off, and handed one to Ben with a few words of sage advice about this being precisely why rock came wrapped in plastic.

School again, and, eventually, poison. Avon got better at it, as time went on. They went to pediatrician appointments, and made trips to the hospital. One child and then the other. Both only occasionally, when he couldn't help himself. He treasured the feeling of their hot, clammy brows under his cool hand. Their clinging to him. Ben asking if he could sleep in his dad's bed tonight. How easy being with them was, like this. The pure, absolute, unsexual vice of it--all that love. Total reliance. So safe you could hardly breathe for it. The air in the house so still it hardly moved. All they had was each other.

He couldn't act, but he lied elaborately and well. Stories spilled out of him automatically. He had perfect excuses, and he remembered every detail of them. And it was pleasant, to be reminded that everyone cared about the children. That they wouldn't be left absolutely alone, if anything were to happen to him. Inga dropped in and fretted. Poor little Ben and Delia. Jenna and Will stopped by--hey kiddos! Avon put Cally off though—afraid of the knowing look on her face. He worried she'd see right through. Into the nasty, needing core of him.

He was careful. They were never very sick. They were safer this way. He told himself as much every time he thought too hard about what he was doing. Delia was too tired to get into fights now. In fact she didn't go to school very often anymore, so the temptation didn’t arise. Which was fine--her intellectual development was hardly being held back. She used the time to read, and Avon knew for a fact he was cleverer than her teacher, that he could devote more time to her than a teacher with a class of thirty would be able to. Delia was all caught up on home work. At the head of the class she intermittently attended.

The friend she'd defended, Eman Somebody, moved away--the bullying had gotten rather bad, with Delia absent, and it had influenced her parents to take up a job offer in Manchester. Eman's parents hoped Delia's health improved--her mother impulsively clutched Avon's hand as they took their daughter away at the end of her farewell visit. He was so brave, raising two children on his own.

Avon knew he wasn't brave. He was a screaming coward, worse even than Will, who couldn't so much as get through an interview without blathering in panic. Avon was raw, flayed alive by the fear that he'd lose Ben and Delia too, that his sanity would slip out and away from him, that he would fail the children and thus fail Blake and himself. That the Ozone layer would rip off the Earth, and the Eurozone could collapse entirely, and anti-bacterial soap would breed a plague, and the world's awfulness, which Blake had always thought it important to resist and combat, would come and blight the children, and there would be no safety for them.

All he had was this house. His work. Their love. His memories. Home-made pasta-sauce, with oregano and not-too-much rosemary and six or seven careful grains of something people shouldn't eat. Small things against a world that did not care.

And one day, weak and needing him, face pale and eyes bruise-dark, Delia told him to stop. She was sitting in bed and he brought in lunch. She put her book down and tasted the clear broth. She frowned. Some bitter note. Avon tensed. He'd gotten over-confident.

"Daddy," she said, and he knew she knew from the tone of it alone. "I know you love us. And I know you're--"

She swallowed and her eyes were wet--tears closer to the surface because she was in pain. Had he wanted them to cry for him, in his stead? Maybe he had, a little.

"You're sad," she finished, bravely. And she was so thoroughly Blake’s daughter--the set of her jaw, the unalterable eyes, the willingness to say awful things to him, the feeling that she must. "You're sad father's gone. And you did a bad thing, because of it. But I don't want to be sick any more, and Ben doesn't understand. And you could really hurt him by accident, because he’s smaller than me. So you have to stop."

She was so careful, with it. She must love him, Avon thought. Despite all this. Because she wasn't afraid he'd hit her, or kill her. She was afraid of upsetting him. After all the vomiting and the lassitude and the engineered mysterious iron-deficiencies--Delia was afraid of hurting _him_.

Avon knew he’d never deserved anything that had happened to him—the awful things and the unbearable brightness alike. Notes too high and sweet for human throats to bear. Sweetness that called forth responses he'd never been able to adequately give; that asked for sounds to crack his throat and heart and shatter him.

“I'm--so sorry." He stood there for a while after saying it. He didn't know what came next. "I'm so sorry," he said it again, as if that were a brick to build with. And this time he let himself feel it. "I never wanted to hurt you. Not--"

"I know," Delia said. “Daddy, I know."

He swallowed. "I. Cordelia, baby, how can you ever—?" He stopped.

"It's all right Daddy," she said.

"It isn't," he snapped. She didn't wince. She just looked at him, and he wanted to sink to his knees. He wanted to cry. His voice was—He could _hear_ it, and he didn’t want her to, and he couldn’t control it, not at all. "How can you forgive me for this?"

"You forgive me when I mess up," she pointed out fairly.

"You're a _child_ ," he hissed. "It's not your _fault_."

"Remember when we watched that movie, when Ben had a cold? The one I made you stop. And the bad guy--"

"Prince Humperdinck," Avon said, correcting her lack of specificity automatically, even now.

"Yeah, him. He says Westley's going to suffer more than anyone in a hundred years. Because he really loved Buttercup. And she really loved him."

"Love is no excuse," Avon said flatly.

"Father used to say there wasn't any such thing as excuses. There were just reasons people did things, and contax."

"Context."

“Right. And he said I had to understand that as best I could, and to worry about getting on with things from there. He said excuses were a stupid way to think about things."

"He said a lot of things."

Avon took a slow breath, and let it out of his chest. Here they were, then. What now?

"Can I have your permission to tell someone who can help you not do it?" Delia asked. "Maybe Uncle Will, or Aunt Cally? Is that okay?" She hesitated, and asked with trepidation, "Do you want to be better?"

He nodded tightly. "I'll tell Cally. And you can talk to her afterwards. We have to be--careful, about getting help. Or they'll take you away from me. That might--"

A screaming, clutching panic rose in his chest at the thought, and he shut his eyes. God, his children in foster care, his and Blake's children. He could not have failed more thoroughly. Foster care—dirty blankets and strangers and uncertain changes and Ben forgetting what he looked like (did he remember Blake?).

"That might be for the best," he forced himself to finish.

Because he was a child-abuser. He was the sort of person his children weren't safe around. He wanted to clutch Cordelia to him and hold her forever, fingers digging into her thin shoulders. He wanted to protect her and Ben from himself. He could not bear to think about what might have happened. What he could have accidentally done. His brain absolutely shut down and refused to frame anything like 'I might have killed my children'.

"No one is taking me anywhere," Delia said, so sure. "Aunt Cally will have some ideas. You'll figure it out. We can get you help without that. You'll find a way."

Avon thought about pre-packed M&S meals that he would have to ask Delia to heat in the microwave, having asked her to check that the seals were still unbroken. He would have to establish consequences for slip-ups, checks on himself. He would have to find a therapist who was both competent and could be relied upon not to talk. He’d have to climb a steep hill back to an uncomfortable, unwanted degree of mental clarity, from which vantage point he'd have to look at himself. The prospect wasn't pleasant.

"I can't do everything,” he told his daughter. There might not be a way. He couldn’t promise. He couldn't even survive Blake properly. _God_ _,_ what a pathetic, embarrassing mess.

Delia shrugged. "No. Just most things."

He gave her a smirk--and it was a reasonable facsimile of the one he'd had before. He would have to try harder. It would hurt more. He would have to let Cally and Will and maybe even Jenna see exactly what Blake's death had done to him. He would have to ask for help. But if it was that or losing Ben and Delia, he knew what he'd prefer. Pride, even his not inconsiderable allowance of pride, was nothing to them.

"You were named for a very brave girl, you know," he told Delia. "Who gave honest counsel, no matter what. The best of daughters."

"I know--Shakespeare. You've told me." Delia was always impatient when anyone questioned her knowledge. "Only Father said that wasn't quite it. He said," and she frowned, remembering it, and almost caught the cadence in repeating it back to him, "in a way, I was named for you."

Avon blinked. There was nothing he could say to that. Even in his absence, Blake had the power to devastate him. What was all of this but proof of that.

"I'll call Cally and ask her to come over tomorrow."

"Can we order in pizza tonight?" Trust his daughter to try and turn a crisis to her own advantage.

Pizza. It would be _crawling_ with germs, and besides, there were leftovers. But some of the leftovers contained—No. The pizza--wouldn't kill them. The world would, eventually, but probably not today.

"All right,” Avon said.

"All right," Delia said, mimicking him, smiling his smile, and Avon thought - It might be. A little. Eventually.

He took the tray away. He poured the soup down the drain, letting the bowl rattle in the metal basin. He texted Cally, and braced himself for terrible understanding and very likely tears (hers--and no less awkward and awful for that). He ordered pizza. Something with vegetables, that they might preserve the illusion of healthfulness in some measure. He methodically threw out all the leftovers in the fridge and the freezer--even the ones he knew he hadn't tampered with. Start again, completely. And miss Blake at the weeping of the rain, and want him at the shrinking of the tide, and nevertheless pretend resignation to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground, because Cordelia had asked him if he wanted to be better. And for her and for Ben and for Blake, always for Blake, he did. Or at least he wanted to want it. And that would have to be enough.

 

**Author's Note:**

> beta'd by aralias
> 
> In addition to "Lament", this also steals lines from Millay's "Sonnet/Time does not bring relief; you all have lied", and "Dirge Without Music".
> 
> This is not, by the way, the same universe as "Post-Mortem".


End file.
